Monthly Archives: May 2003

Dick Morris writes with an insider’s perspective on Sidney Blumenthal’s memoirs of his service in the Clinton administration. According to Morris, Blumenthal’s book constitutes the authentic version of the gospel according to Hillary Clinton: “Sidney Blumenthal parrots Hillary’s paranoid mutterings.” »

U.S. News and World Report has a compelling account of “the inside story of how U.S. terrorist hunters are going after al Qaeda”: “Playing offense.” (Courtesy of Right Wing News.) The story notes something I have long believed — that when al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11, they thought they were still dealing with Bill Clinton. They expected us to do no more than to lob a few »

The guys at Fraters Libertas only intimate the fun awaiting the new inductees into the Northern Alliance of Bloggers now that alliance Commissioner Hugh Hewitt has granted our petition for expansion of the alliance to include Shot in the Dark and SCSU Scholars. »

Did the Germans seek to isolate and enslave American Jewish prisoners of war? I did not know that they did. How did their comrades-in-arms respond? Tonight public television broadcasts the enraging, inspirational Charles Guggenheim documentary “Berga,” telling the story of Americans taken prisoner by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. None of the standard accounts of the battle tells this story. Learn the name of Hans Kasten, a »

We predicted a couple of weeks ago that the crackdown on al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia and, especially, Morocco would make our own methods look very gentle. Today the prosecutor-general of the appeals court of Casablanca announced that the man who organized the recent bombings in Casablanca was capured on Monday, but unfortunately died in police custody. The prosecutor-general said that the terrorist “suffered from heart disease” and died while »

Max Abrahms has a column in the Los Angeles Times whose principal virtue is concisely stating the implausibility of the scenario of a “road map” to peace: “Road map torn by ambiguity.” Abrahms opens his piece as follows: “There is something intellectually dishonest about a ‘peace process’ that tacitly promises mutually exclusive demands to the Israelis and Palestinians by papering over their differences until they inevitably collide.” What is the »

National Review’s Rod Dreher has come into the possession of an astounding memorandum from Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll instructing his section editors to knock off the blatant liberal editorializing by reporters on the news pages: “Hell freezes over.” (Courtesy of Hugh Hewitt.) »

As former users of the Blogger software, we never quite grew accustomed to the occasional site outages that felt like near-death experiences to us. Today was our first such prolonged experience with Hosting Matters, our current home base. We understand that a fire at the location housing our servers caused an electrical outage that shut them down and made us inaccessible from mid-morning until just now. Whatever it was we’re »

Saudi officials have announced the arrest of an unspecified number of al Qaeda members believed responsible for the recent bombings in Riyadh. One of those arrested, Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, is a high-ranking al Qaeda member and is believed to have organized the bombings. My favorite line in the Washington Post’s report: al-Ghamdi was among three men who “were arrested in an Internet cafe in the holy city of »

We’ve been posting all the items worth reading on Sidney Blumenthal’s memoirs of his service in the Clinton administration. This morning Robert Bartley devotes a magnificient column covering most of the Wall Street Journal editorial page to Blumenthal’s book: “No wars, only scandals.” »

In our eyes, the most gifted as well as the most beautiful of the young conservative columnists is Michelle Malkin. If she were a Dowdy liberal instead of a brilliant conservative bombshell, she would have won a Pulitzer Prize for Journalism some time over the past couple years during which she has broken numerous big stories in her column. It meant a lot to us when she followed our invitation »

Trunk, as something of a third party buff, I enjoyed your piece on the subject. The Perot campaign of 1992 is endlessly fascinating to me. What strikes me most about it is that, unlike nearly all third party candidacies of note, Perot ran his insurgency from the center. Moreover, he did this while running against a Republican president who was, at best, only moderately conservative and a Democratic candidate who »

I was on the road today and, while waiting in the Cleveland airport, picked up a stray copy of USA Today. A very foolish columnist named DeWayne Wickham has a piece called “How sweet it is: Respect for Clinton rebounds among Amercans.” The column is based on a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll which asked a sample of Americans to identify the “greatest” president. Wickham gleefully reports that 11 percent named Bill »

None of us at Power Line have been big fans of the “Road Map” to peace in the Middle East. I’ve accepted it on the theory that I, like Ariel Sharon, trust George Bush. My impression is that the “road map” has plenty of wiggle room and doesn’t commit Israel to anything unless and until the Arabs cease their attempted genocide. Which is, after all, the whole point. But I »

One of the advantages President Bush had as a candidate for president in 2000 was the formidable third-party candidacy of Ralph Nader as the Green Party candidate to the left of Al Gore. Nader attracted nearly 3 percent of the vote and almost certainly affected the outcome of the election. Will the Green Party run a serious candidate for president again in 2000, or endorse the Democratic nominee? Today’s Washington »